Cambridge University Press Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000

Industrial modernity takes it as self-evident that there is a difference between people and machines, but the corollary of this has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatise the modernisation of subjectivity. Daly begins with Victorian railway melodramas in which an individual is rescued from the path of the train just in time, and ends with J. G. Ballard's novel Crash in which people seek out such collisions. Daly argues that these collisions dramatise the relationship between the individual and the industrial society, and suggests that the pleasures of fictional suspense help people to assimilate the speeding up of everyday life. This book will be of interest to scholars of modernism, literature and film. Review Review of the hardback: 'This is a concise, impeccably researched book, which teases out a coherent narrative from a seemingly disparate set of cultural sources.' The Times Literary SupplementReview of the hardback: 'Literature, Technology, and Modernity delivers a compelling, original, and intellectually sophisticated account …' EnglishReview of the hardback: 'Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 is inventive, resourceful, and well-grounded in the social and cultural history of the hundred and forty year period the book covers. Daly's book is a great read …' Modernism/Modernity Book Description Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s onwards. About the Author Nicholas Daly is Lecturer in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1999), and of articles in Novel, ELH, Victorian Studies, New Formations, among others.